An Introduction to the Issue of Consumer Law in South America

Journal of Consumer Policy - This Special Issue has a long history. It goes back to a conference in July 2017 organized by Cláudia Lima Marques in Porto Alegre Brazil, the first of the Center...     

Time Orientation in Languages and Tax Avoidance

Journal of Business Ethics - Studies suggest that when a language requires grammatical marking of future events, speakers prefer immediate payoffs and engage in less future-oriented behavior. If...     

Insurance Rating Games: Strikes,Spares, and Bags

Carefully designed classroom activities and games can be used to increase student engagement, motivation, and learning. This article describes two games that have been used with students of risk management and insurance to help highlight the intricacies of insurance pricing. These two games, bowling insurance and bags insurance, help students experience the challenging nature of premium determination in risk transfer contracts and also connect the various actions taken by insurers during the insurance transaction.     

Environmental factors influencing the management of key accounts in an Arab Middle Eastern context

Within the sales and marketing literature, it is recognised that a range of external factors can influence how companies in the business-to-business field manage business relationships within national and across international borders. However, there have been very few studies that explore the influence of the external environment on key account relationships, especially within the context of emerging economies. This study draws on the network approach and contingency theory to identify and highlight the influence of external environmental factors on the management of inter-organisational relationships with key customers in emerging economies in the Arab Middle East region. It is based on an extensive qualitative enquiry that utilises 50 in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted in Jordan with endogenous and Western firms. It concludes that key account practices within an Arab context are shaped by a number of contingencies that are embedded in broader institutional contexts and the business environment, which may challenge the adoption of company-wide universal key account management policies across borders.     

The Role of the Global Reporting Initiative's Sustainability Reporting Guidelines in the Social Screening of Investments

Social screening of investments calls not only for investment policy and criteria, but also for information about companies, their policies, practices and performance. The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and its June 2000 Sustainability Reporting Guidelines have the potential to significantly improve the usefulness and quality of information reported by companies about their environmental, social and economic impacts and performance. The GRI aims to develop a voluntary reporting framework that will elevate sustainability reporting practices to a level equivalent to that of financial reporting in rigour, comparability, auditability and general acceptance. This will be a welcome and efficient supplement to the questionnaires, interviews, press releases, media reports and other sources of information traditionally used for screening in investment decision making – social/ethical and mainstream. The Dow Jones Sustainability Group Index, the Jantzi Social Index and the Innovest EcoValue'21 analytical platform, together with the SRI community, are all likely to benefit from GRI-style sustainability reports. One of the GRI's key challenges is to accommodate the broad variety of disclosure needs and expectations of a wide range of report users and company stakeholders. To maximize the usefulness of the GRI Guidelines, report users, including the SRI community, need to be engaged in the process of developing and refining the Guidelines over time. The GRI Guidelines are emerging as an important instrument in enabling companies to communicate with their stakeholders about performance and accountability beyond just the financial bottom line.     

Risk,balanced skills and entrepreneurship

This paper proposes that risk aversion encourages individuals to invest in balanced skill profiles, making them more likely to become entrepreneurs. By not taking this possible linkage into account, previous research has underestimated the impacts of both risk aversion and balanced skills on the likelihood individuals choose entrepreneurship. Data on Dutch university graduates provide an illustration supporting our contention. We raise the possibility that even risk-averse people might be suited to entrepreneurship; and it may also help explain why prior research has generated somewhat mixed evidence about the effects of risk aversion on selection into entrepreneurship.     

创新沙盒

在印度，大约有7亿处于金字塔底部的消费者，他们的需求受到许多不可变更的外部预设条件限制，《金字塔底部的财富》作者普拉哈拉德在本文中将这部分消费者比喻成“沙盒”，探讨如何围绕这个新兴市场创新商业模式。     

Strategies to prevent economic recessions from causing business failure

An average of more than 500,000 businesses failed in the United States during each of the 10 recessions that have occurred since the end of World War II. Yet, scholar and practitioner understanding of how to prepare for and respond to the challenges of an economic downturn remains extremely limited. This article analyzes and synthesizes the information from academic theory and business experience on managing through an economic recession. To assist firms in successfully navigating economic recessions, we suggest a program that involves positioning by investing in multiple markets and geographies, planning by developing a turnaround plan for facing sharply declining sales, promoting by maintaining marketing initiatives, and preparing by acting in anticipation of economic recovery.